Night of the Great Aurora

No one predicted this spectacle. But on May 27 the last-minute warnings went out to look for a fabulous show as night fell.

And what a show it was! As darkness fell the sky was lit with green curtains. After midnight the curtains converged at the zenith for that most spectacular of sky sights, a coronal burst.

As the night began I was at the Rothney Observatory helping out with the public stargazing night.

We saw the Space Station rise out of the west over the Rockies and pass through the Northern Lights.

It then headed off east, appearing here as the streak amid the Lights and light pollution of Calgary.

To continue to shoot the display I, too, decided to head east, to home. I should have gone west, to the mountains.

I drove through rain to get home, and missed the peak of the display, judging by images from others in the Rockies, and those to the north.

But as I got home clouds began to clear enough for a glimpse of the Space Station, on its next pass, flying overhead, again through the aurora. I wonder what the astronauts might have been seeing looking down.

From home, I caught another bright sub-storm outburst to the north, as the curtains suddenly exploded in brightness and rapid motion, with characteristic pink fringes at the bottoms, from nitrogen molecules.

What impressed me about this display was the smell! Yes, you see auroras and some claim to hear them. But this display is one I’ll remember for the springtime scent of lilacs in the night air as the Lights danced.

The Great Aurora of May 27 from Alan Dyer on Vimeo.

Here is a short music video of several time-lapse sequences I shot, of the sub-storm then post-storm subsidence into the patchy flaming and flickering effect that we often see at the end of a great display. And this was certainly one of them.

We southerners were treated to the class of display you usually have to travel north the Arctic and auroral oval to see.